Photograph by: Aaron Lynett
, (Aaron Lynett / National Post)

I’ve had an earworm for weeks now on a semi-continuous loop. It’s a couple of lines of Father John Misty’s I’m Writing a Novel from Fear Fun. The tune by the former Fleet Foxes drummer is simple and catchy (A chord, E chord) but it’s the cheeky lyrics that have tunnelled so insistently into my psyche: “And I’m writing a novel! Because it’s never been done before!”

Isn’t that how novels, how any work of literary fiction, should be written? As if it hasn’t been done before? Father John Misty must have been picking up the same books I have lately, novel after novel reading as if their authors are laboriously reinventing the wheel. At first I thought I was experiencing an extended bout of the “fiction nausea” virus that first appeared with the publication of David Shield’s 2010 manifesto, Reality Hunger, and has become epidemic in the wake of Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume autobiographical “novel,” My Struggle.

But I’ve adored several story collections lately, including C.P. Boyko’s new Novelists, his 2012 collection Psychology, and Rivka Galchen’s American Innovations, as well as a number of older novels such as Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.

That pesky earworm, it seems, is solely a response to novels of a recent vintage.

My expectations, though, were high for Tom Rachman’s The Rise & Fall of Great Powers, due to its ambitious title and its forerunner, The Imperfectionists. Rachman’s first book sits on my most-recommended shelf, alongside other favourites such as Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn and George Saunders’ Pastoralia, books I recommend often to enthusiastic response.

The Imperfectionists is a collection of terrific stories masquerading as a novel. The various protagonists are all connected to an English-language newspaper based in Rome (kind of like the International Herald-Tribune in Paris) and are mainly journalists and editors. These sophisticated and heartbreaking stories are powered by excellent characters in plausible crisis, existential and otherwise, and almost every story is strong enough to stand alone. A historical narrative about the founding of the newspaper by a lovesick Hearst-type magnate is interwoven between the stories, serving to bind the whole together, and hence earning the book that coveted and more marketable moniker: novel.

Rachman’s new book is many things The Imperfectionists is not: shambling, non-urgent, sentimental with moments of forced cuteness, only nominally international, and, yes, a novel.

There are elements of déjà-read in The Rise & Fall of Great Powers: a quirky and resolutely unsentimental loner heroine with a weird name; a global quest to locate the protagonist’s true identity triggered by a message from a former lover; a Dickenson main character who takes on the role of father figure (as in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, he ends up being the most interesting and poignant character). And so on.

The main weakness of the book, shared by so many novels today, is that the narrative in the present is so much less interesting than the narratives in the past — so the backstories do all the heavy lifting. Tooly Zylberberg as a thirtysomething woman living quietly in a small Welsh town running a failing bookstore is not a particularly interesting person. Tooly as a 10-year-old girl is pretty captivating, and Tooly on the cusp of adulthood is interesting, albeit often annoyingly quirky.

Rachman serves up some wonderful secondary characters, particularly the charismatic and sociopathic grifter Venn, who serves as a kind of Fagin, Artful Dodger and Bill combo to Tooly’s Oliver Twist. Also engaging, is the old Russian-émigré autodidact, Humphrey, who ends up being so much more than meets the eye (and ear: his malapropisms and mangled colloquialisms — meant to be funny — are painful and reminiscent of the less-than-believable Boris in Tartt’s Goldfinch).

The book’s three time frames are braided together — one of those novel structures that’s imposed to fuel to a narrative that isn’t providing its own internal combustion through plot, an internal sense of urgency and momentum, not to mention voice and language.

Rachman is a gifted wordsmith. As in The Imperfectionists, there’s grace, beauty and wisdom here: “Tooly wished not to exist, to be erased, imprisoned as she was in this unpopular little junk of a girl, exhausted by the constancy of herself.” But, strangely, there’s also much rambling, and hokey, tortured sentences such as: “Beneath these layers was a figure consisting of bony sections and soft sections, not necessarily ordered according to the preferences of fashion,” and “Humphrey’s books had little to fear from onrushing water, he and soap being on terms of only passing familiarity.” I can almost hear the “ba-dum chunk!” accompanying a Catskills comic as he delivers that one.

There are political discussions and the story takes place in Wales, Bangkok, Italy and New York, but the overall sense is one of enclosure, of Tooly and her small world with its self-obsessed entourage. Unlike the truly international sensibility of Rachman’s first book, here the various locales serve more as painted backdrops than windows looking out into the larger world.

It’s this smallness that makes this almost 400-page novel feel less than necessary. Sure there’s the overarching theme of people reinventing themselves, of sculpting their own pasts “so vigorously in the retelling that her memories had chipped loose from the events themselves, detaching her from others who’d also been there,” as Rachman writes of another character.

But unlike the reinvention of self in The Great Gatsby, for example, that of Tooly, Humphrey and the others isn’t a tragedy or reflection of the zeitgeist, but merely what these individual characters see when they finally confront a mirror.

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